


where we shall part no more

by anaesthetist



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Emotionally Repressed, M/M, Pining, Victorian Attitudes, nostalgia as a symptom of scurvy, the church of scotland has a lot to answer for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25914856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anaesthetist/pseuds/anaesthetist
Summary: He shook his head once more, eyes flitting to the bible by his side. Still opened, he closed it. His fist curled atop its cover and he let his thumb caress a line down its spine.Like this, he thought.I would touch him like this or not at all.
Relationships: Lt John Irving/Lt Edward Little
Comments: 29
Kudos: 42





	1. in our fear we learn to see

Mostly, John remembered the haar.

Rising from the sea and dreeping over land, it smothered the coast like a dream, nothing before or beyond it, soaking everything and all like rain never could. It hung in the air, seeping right through to bone, the damp weighing down hair and clothes. One could easily catch a chill, John knew well, brought down from the north in the spring to dissipate like smoke in the autumn.

The haar would take him to sea. That was what his mother warned when he wandered off too far, getting lost in the mist. The haar would lead him to the sea, and in the sea he would drown.

Sucking on the scar atop his upper lip, John thought of his mother. 

He recalled much less of her than he knew of her for certain. Her piousness came in parable, but her tenderness came in memory. To him, she existed in her entirety not as the godly women people spoke of, though it was no false assumption of her character, but as his mother.

Once, halfway around the world, David had asked him how she spoke, how she smiled, how she looked. Aggrieved, he couldn’t remember much of her, but only because he didn’t think he would have to. Just a babe of four, no one had warned him to prepare. So, he told him about the lilt in her voice, the spread of her teeth, the stutter of her laughter. Most importantly, though, he told him she was beautiful. She was only beautiful because John loved her, David had complained, like he thought his brother better than such bias.

John was not.

If she were here, things would have turned out differently. Things would have turned out better. Of that John had no doubt.

For certain she would have never allowed him to go to sea. Through the haar, just a voice, he could hear her telling him _stay close, my darling_ but he had already strayed too far. A panic arose inside him. _Mother_ , he thought desperately, staggering blind, hands groping before him. _Mother, I don’t want to drown. Mother—_

_Tap, tap, tap._

John roused and the haar retreated. In the cold, empty space it left behind stood Edward Little.

“I’m on watch,” he said, gloved fingers curling around the door panel he had pushed aside. It did not feel as intrusive as it should. “Will you—I need you to supervise the men taking Seaman Johnson down to the hold. The doctors need the space—”

“Aye, sir,” he said, sitting now.

Edward’s face twitched with a moment’s relief, his mouth ajar with a thank you he need not give. It quickly closed. His brow dropped, followed by his chin. John followed the line of his sight down to his pocket from which he produced the key to the Dead Room. Taking a step inside, he placed it on the table and together they watched it slide to an inch before the edge, following the downward tilt of the ship towards the bow.

As if they required the reminder, the ship screamed in the strangle of the ice.

“I must be off,” Edward told him, then nodded, pausing another moment before he finally did so.

Left alone once more, John stared at the key on his desk but did not reach for it. In his lap, his hands had tightened into fists, the hangs and catches of his fingernails providing an allaying sting across the face of his palms. He flexed them flat against his thighs when the punishment seemed sufficient.

 _Do not_ , he began to warn himself, but stopped before he let the thought live.

Steering his thoughts as far from Edward— _Lieutenant Little_ —as he could, he dressed for a trip below, coddling himself in a scarf before stepping out into the narrow passageway. He proceeded along to the crew’s quarters, Mr. Diggle’s profanity already scorching his ears as he passed both he and the others that slept in their hammocks, until at last he reached the sickbay. A small group of men where huddled by the partition, but they parted in his presence.

“Men,” he said in brief acknowledgment, then stepped inside.

The sickbay, fashioned from every spare inch of the forepeak, was full. Some men, nursing missing fingers and toes, were sat pressed into a bunk together, while others, much less alert to the world, rested in hammocks. His fellow countrymen, doctors Peddie and McDonald, were both present; the former assisting a man in the consumption of some watered-down gruel, while the latter was bending his head over that of a man sleeping, like a mother marvelling in the glory of her babe’s breathing. Between them both, wrapped in canvas, was Seaman Johnson.

“Lieutenant,” said Dr McDonald, straightening from his bend. “Here to take Mr Johnson, I presume?”

“Yes,” he said, eyes drifting to where he could make out the impression of Johnson’s nose in the canvas. He did not like the sickbay. “I know how—busy you are.”

“You’ll have plenty of volunteers for assistance, I’m sure,” Dr Peddie said then, head gesturing towards the dividing wall, beyond which the men waited. John thought, briefly, who might be so concerned with his own bones and body when he went, but his mind remained startlingly void. _No one on this ship_. “He was a good man.”

“God is just. I’m sure his suffering will be nothing in the scheme of his reward,” he said, then lifted his eyes to the room. “Why else would we wish to return to our Father, if it were not better than all of this? Better than beyond our greatest comprehension?”

It was meant as comfort, but it was clear that these men of science—and faith, John had no doubt of that, good Church of Scotland men that they were—did not appreciate such sentiments. Not in their sickbay. They strived ceaselessly for the body to endure, burdened by the taking of another man’s cross, but nothing endured. Nothing was as lovely in this world as with the knowledge that there was no permanence to it, that it might wholly belong to you and no other.

He departed the sickbay with four men: three living and one dead, but each a man all the same.

One thing he knew of Charles Johnson now, John thought as he clambered down to the orlop deck, the temperature plummeting with him, was that he was not so very far from home. Nova Scotia was so tantalisingly close that maps baring its name often caused his heart to skip a beat.

But no, that was not his _Scotia_.

Crouching, John lifted the lower hatch to the hold and let the men descend before him. The one holding the lantern, William Jerry, went first, his cursing of the cold no doubt tempered by his presence. From below, he called for the others to be careful with Johnson, and mindful of the rats.

Down in the hold, icy water sloshed at their ankles, melted by the residual heat from the locomotive engine that puffed and clanged directly below John’s cabin. So bad was the sound, he had dreamt one evening that he’d been thrown on the lines at Haymarket station as a train passed, though for what transgression he had never quite been able to surmise. With the sound of the engine was the constant scuttle and scratch of rats, their little bodies falling over each other to escape from the light.

_Where do you suppose they keep them?_

John startled. With the glow of the lantern disappearing towards the Dead Room, he turned towards the engine room. He could taste the coal in the air. He could smell the sewage and waste. He could hear his brother’s voice.

He had asked the question when another one had died. A baby—it had been just a baby, new on earth but still a son of Adam, marked with the sin of humankind. They would be saved by grace if God willed it to be so. That was what the ministers aboard had said: that He was fair and perfectly right in all things, and the question was not how they can be returned to us, but how we can be returned to them.

They should both have been asleep by such an hour, prayers long said, but the mother in steerage had not ceased in her wailing. In Gaelic, he remembered. No doubt ran or burned from her home, the ship to Australia her baby’s cot and coffin.

 _Do you suppose the babe is on her person?_ David had asked in an absent whisper.

John turned as he had done in rough sheets. Somewhere in their cabin, a pencil rolled to the floor with a climb and crash of a wave he now longed for against the starboard side. He had squeezed his eyes shut against the pillow, thinking, hoping, praying that wherever they might be, there were no rats. God above, he prayed for there to be no rats.

“Lieutenant Irving!” came a voice from along the hold. “Do you—"

“I’ll be right with you!” he called back, beginning to stagger towards the light by the Dead Room. He fell shoulder-first into the wall when he reached it, thrown by the tilt, and fished the key from his pocket. “Be quick,” he said and unlocked the door.

*

He had never known fear quite like it.

It was akin, he supposed, to the torturous apprehension that marooned in his chest when the time between Malcolm’s letters breached the limit of circumstance. _I have offended him_ , he would fret, trying to remember what he had written. _I have upset him. I have displeased him_. Most of all, however, he worried: _I have lost the only true friend that I have_. The only person in this world not bound by blood to tolerate him, gone forever. 

But it never came to be. Malcolm, a better man than him, forgave all his wretchedness and kept him in all his nightly prayers. There would always be letters.

He imagined a pile steadily growing throughout the years in the top drawer of his father’s desk, kept safe and ready for his return, God willing. What a joy it would be to be reunited with the single greatest pleasure in his life, the quiet correspondence of his best friend. John smiled into his book.

He was sat in the wardroom, halfway through his book— _Rob Roy,_ a favourite of his on account of his childish wonderment of the Highlands more than any affection his father held for Sir Walter, though George teased him otherwise—when he heard a commotion on the upper deck. Footsteps were racing above him. No sooner had he risen to his feet did Gibson appear with news that a sledge party had been spotted approaching from the southwest.

 _Edward’s party_.

He dressed and joined the men on the deck, searching out George to stand by him. Around them, men cheered the return of their shipmates until it became noticeably clear that something was wrong—that some men were missing.

“Is Lieutenant Little among them?” George called up to the lookout.

In the fifteen, maybe twenty seconds it took him to respond, John felt his heart, stomach and lungs do no quantifiable manner of leaping and squeezing, a nausea tightening his chest and burning the back of his throat. Past foreboding, his mind and body had gone straight to the worst. Grabbing the taffrail with mitten-clad hands, he felt he might be sick.

“Aye, sir,” came the voice from above. “In the boat, sir.”

Like a marionette cut loose of its strings, John let his head fall atop the back of his hands. George slapped his back in exhilaration.

Edward had been blinded by the snow, but only temporarily. In good humour, bandages over his eyes, he told them, “I shall welcome the respite from your unpleasant visage, George,” his fingers curling around the edge of the treatment table, knuckles white. He’d been lucky not to lose a finger, John thought, tucking his own against his chest as he watched Dr Peddie sear a man’s wound where a toe used to be. He gave an unconscious lick of his upper lip.

His good mood did not keep.

Within two days he had forced himself from the sickbay back to his cabin, insisting that he was ready to make a full report to Sir John, sight or no sight, and that he would travel to _Erebus_ if need be. Captain Crozier, in a bout of rationality, had called him a bloody idiot for suggesting as much, an ordered him to rest until better. While the blindness did not bother him much, the headaches certainly came for their vengeance. John could hear his whimpering from his own cabin, over the sound of the encroaching ice and Mr Blanky’s snoring.

Stepping from the wardroom, he stopped by Edward’s door. Raising a hand to knock it, he gave a fleeting look down either end of the passageway and snatched it back as if burnt. _This is ridiculous_ , he scolded himself, moving to return to the solitude of his own cabin when—

“John, I know it’s you. Stop skulking and come inside.”

Like a child caught, John’s cheeks burned a healthy red. By his side, his fingers twitched before pulling back the partition to Edward’s cabin and ducking inside. Though he could not see him, he kept his face to the floor, the heat radiating down the front of his chest and pooling in his gut.

“My apologies, I—”

“Sit,” he said, like an order. John did, pulling the chair from beneath Edward’s desk. “How fares _Terror_?”

“She’s well.”

Edward hummed. He was propped up on a pillow, a hand tucked behind his head while the other rested flat on his stomach. Most of the skin on his face was peeling where it had been burnt, but shiny with the balm Dr McDonald had applied to soothe it. It had the aroma of what John imagined the inside of a Papist church might smell like.

John shifted. His knee was wedged into the side of Edward’s bunk, the handle of a drawer cutting into the bone. He opened his legs a little wider, letting his hands fall into a clasp between them.

“And the ice?” he asked. “Is there—”

“Nothing for miles,” Edward told him, dour. “No water, no land, no game. Just ice.”

John pressed his thumbs together and brought them to his mouth to gnaw on the nail. Soon he would have to start moving along his fingers, he thought, pulling his hands away again to inspect the damage. Not nearly enough. He returned them to his mouth, eyes set on the swell of Edward’s bicep against which he rested his head, face turned in John’s direction. If he knew what he was doing, he did not tell him to stop.

“I used to love the snow,” he said suddenly. “The way it looked atop of hills.”

He thought of Garbh Choire Mòr, a wound of snow and sharp granite rising suddenly to disappear into the cold grey void above it. But it was not to nothing. Once escaped from its jaws, it plateaued into long, languid waves of landscape that only God Himself could have mastered.

“Not so pleasant up close, is it?”

John rubbed his thumb over his lip.

“No, I don’t suppose it is,” he said. “Should God permit our leave of this place, I shan’t be back.”

Edward breathed out a laugh, humourless.

Inside the cabin, the heat had grown exponentially with the shared warmth of their bodies. _It could be like this always_ , a sordid little voice in his head said, a fire licking down his loins. How much warmer he would be, he thought, rubbing at the damp peak of his sternum as he dared not look at Edward. _As if you would know_ , it spoke again, crueller this time. _As if anyone would hold such a shameful man in such a way._

“Do you believe He will?” Edward asked then, startling him from a strange stupor. He sat straight in his seat. “Do you believe God will see us through this?”

“Do you distrust Him?”

“No,” he said, which John suspected was the truth, but maybe not the whole truth.

“Then He will guide you to what He wills for you, for all of us,” he said, as sure in this as his own wickedness. He reached out, placing a hand on the wall of Edward’s berth. “And don’t fret, I’ve warned George what a sin it is to lead a blind man astray.” 

*

After breakfast, John returned to his cabin.

By his desk he sat, great coat hung neatly over the back of his chair, and moved his bible—opened at this morning’s choice of scripture reading—to the side. In its place, he reached from his shelf and brought before himself a copy of _The History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland._ Once belonging to his brother Lewis, it had fallen into his possession on his last visit home.

Though he held John Knox in no particular esteem, the book, dogeared as testament, had been for him a great source of understanding. Everything was as it was because of this, that, or the next thing. It settled him. It soothed him. He turned to the page most worn. The ink seemed to be leaking from the page into his fingertips, the tiny writing barely legible—as though, he thought with great foolishness, Edward Little had written it himself—and lightening like bones under the sun.

Printed into his memory, it read:

_Consider and mark, beloved in the Lord, what we read here to have chanced to Christ’s disciples, and to their poor boat, and you shall well perceive, that the same thing hath chanced, doth and shall chance to the true Church and Congregation of Christ (which is nothing else in this miserable life but a poor ship) travelling in the seas of this unstable and troublesome world, toward the heavenly port, and haven of eternal felicity, which Jesus Christ hath appointed to his elect._

He smiled in strange amusement, thinking _Terror_ a church of any kind.

Should she be freed from the ice, or should she not, John knew better than to question what means or instruments by which it would be done.

Certainly there were no seas to harm her, no storm but that of snow to be fearful. The Devil’s malice and hatred would not come to them like the invisible winds that, but for the divine power, worked to steer them off course. Instead, or so he thought to be the case, it moved within the ship itself, concealed in the earthly body of a reprobate.

Of— _no_.

John shook his head and smoothed down the bristles of his beard around his mouth.

Too often his thoughts had drifted back to that afternoon on the orlop deck, as if that, above all things, was what should concern him most. Upholding the ship’s articles _was_ part of his job, he reasoned, but he knew this was not why it occupied him so dreadfully. He imagined it so clearly, such depravity. Depravity which, as he had agonised over, might not have even taken place.

And what if that was so? What if it was not? He could scarcely imagine what the limit of Cornelius Hickey’s insolence might be. 

He had pondered, briefly, asking Edward what he might do, but he very soon talked himself out of such nonsense. It was neither fair nor appropriate to ask another officer how he might do his job and impart and burden upon him such scandalous claims. Not when he was preoccupied with other, more serious matters, the concern so hopelessly etched into his features that it may as well have been keeping them together.

To soothe him, John thought, was the single tether of joy left to him on this earth.

He shook his head once more, eyes flitting to the bible by his side. Still opened, he closed it. His fist curled atop its cover and he let his thumb caress a line down its spine. _Like this_ , he thought. _I would touch him like this or not at all_.

Then came a knock at his door.

He pulled his hand away, sharp, cracking his elbow on the surface of his desk. Bringing it to his person, he felt like crying. Instead, he stiffened his upper lip and rose to his feet. He pulled the door back to reveal Gibson with a tea tray and stepped into the threshold.

“May I come in, sir?” he asked quietly. “I wouldn’t presume to ask if it weren’t important.”

John swallowed, fingers fidgeting against the door behind him. He twitched himself around, following the line of Gibson’s concerned gaze down to where Hickey was loitering, for once in the process of doing work. It was not to quell Gibson’s comfort but his own that he ducked himself back inside the safety of his cabin, urging him to follow with a, “If you must.”

*

He was born in the shadow of the Nelson Monument. 

In the distance, perched on Calton Hill, he could see it from his father’s study, looking down Princes Street, if he leaned out the window far enough. It never occurred to him, for most of his youth, to take the short journey up past the Observatory and women laying out their washing in the grass, to see the monument for himself—until one day he did.

It had been a pleasant day, bright. Women abandoned their coats for lace shawls, walking arm-in-arm with their husbands as dogs ran alongside children. He climbed quickly to the top. Though as bookish as his younger brothers, he enjoyed play just as much; a conundrum that would trouble both he and his father to find himself a place to settle in the world. He had not sought the answer at the bottom of the Nelson Monument, but he had found one.

The monument, or so it read, had been erected not to express sorrow or celebrate, but: _by his noble example, to teach their sons to emulate what they admire, and, like him, when duty requires it, to die for their country_. His grandfather had died for his country. It struck a chord. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_.

England expected.

Sir John had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar. His stories on the subject were fleeting, an undercurrent of grief throughout, but he had done his duty.

It was hard to now think of him gone.

Away from _Terror_ , they walked in a long procession. A step behind, John watched the snowflakes fall and gather on the shoulder of Edward’s coat as he went, counting as they clustered together before melting, the heat of his body radiating through. Perhaps his hands would be warm, he let himself think, lost in a dream of swirling white as he rubbed his own fingers together and tried to tuck them into the cuff of his own coat. He wished they’d been permitted to wear their mittens.

It was a short affair.

John had not yet digested the words of Sir John, spoken by his captain, when the call and fire of the marines shot through his thoughts. He returned the bicorn to his head. For a moment he searched the great whiteness with eyes open, but nothing appeared to him.

_Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it._

It had never occurred to him, as it had done to others, that God might have forsaken this place. He had told Hickey as much yesterday. So what if there was a dreadful beast roaming the ice? It was no more or less sinful than those it preyed upon, as corrupt in its creation as man.

They went back, had dinner. The rest of the day had been left for mourning, though John doubted it an order of his own captain’s volition. They said their farewells to the rescue party, led by his counterpart on _Erebus_ , Lieutenant Fairholme—born, as he had come to understand, due north and many years after him. Smart and competent, he was a mirror of the officer he might have been, that his father and uncle wanted him to be, if only he’d been _better_.

He never asked why he was never asked to lead the rescue party. He didn’t think it right to ask. 

“Oh, cheer up, John,” George said, removing the pipe from his mouth. “I almost mistook you for our dear old Edward just there.”

John’s gaze moved to where Edward was sat at the farthest away edge of the table, staring down his arm at a glass of neat rum in his hand. His eyes seemed to be trying to conjure a small storm within it. George’s quip at his expense did not rouse him from his thoughts.

“Sir John has died, George.”

“And he above anyone else would expect us to be cheerful for the sake of our men,” he said, which wasn’t without merit, annoyingly. Sir John was nothing if not a great leader of men. “Even if it is insincere. I tell you what, chaps, why don’t I put on a bit of music—”

“Good grief, no,” Edward spoke finally.

“—and we can celebrate the life of our dear brother Sir John. We can even start with a hymn, John, if you would find that most agreeable.”

John would, but he shook his head, called on Gibson and sank the last inch of rum that remained in his glass. He set it down with a tad more firmness than necessary and wiped away the evidence from his mouth. It burned uncomfortably in his throat but spread a pleasant warmth in his belly. He hoped it kept.

“Sir,” Gibson greeted him from the door. 

He looked troubled. John hoped Hickey had nothing to do with it, for the sake of Gibson alone.

“Mr Gibson, please fetch my slops and inform Mr Thomas that I will be taking over his next watch,” he told him, then turned to his fellow officers. “I need to—” he began but did not finish, chewing down on the words that might have followed. “I’ll speak with you later.”

As he moved to the door, Edward caught him by the sleeve of his jacket. He shrugged off the touch as though burned, drawing his arm to himself in feeble protection. Oh, how he longed to touch him, and oh, how he dared not let Edward touch him. He would surely feel the molten fire beneath his skin and wonder why the Devil had put it there.

“I hope you’re not looking for a ladder,” Edward said, to which John had no reply.

*

Once, when he was still a midshipman, Kingston had told him in no uncertain terms that he would be best not speaking if he could help it. Kingston, a good fellow, had suggested such in good faith, but John, to his discredit, had not always applied the well-meaning advice of his friends with the spirit that was required.

But he did so now, on the orlop, working in silence with Mr Sinclair.

Owing to his size, the able seaman had become a sort of store jockey of Mr Diggle and had alerted the ship’s cook to the growing putrid smell way aft. John could smell the rot as he approached, but he speared the top of a tin and pried it open just to be sure, immediately being hit by an odour so vile he almost dropped the tin in his haste to press a handkerchief to his mouth. Only an empty stomach stopped him from being sick.

“This will have to be moved onto the ice,” John told Sinclair, still muffled by his handkerchief. “At night, after the men have gone down to sleep. You are to tell no one, understand?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Sinclair.

John looked upon the tins and rotated the one he still held within his grasp. With famine they would be persecuted, he thought, and with famine they would go. He set the tin down. It was not ideal, but if bread should not come from heaven, then the good Lord had made it so.

He counted the spoiled provisions, then those that were left. Above him he could hear the boisterous games of men upstairs, the booming voice of the marine sergeant. He paused briefly in his calculations, pencil poised against the page, the only other sound by him that of Sinclair’s laboured breaths as he made a clear line of what was to be abandoned on the ice.

Perhaps the ship next, he thought.

“Mr Sinclair, you may return to the lower deck,” John said, reaching to pull the lantern closer to himself. “I’ll see to it that Mr Diggle is generous with your dinner this evening, for your exertions.”

Sinclair leant upon a crate and nodded, “Sir,” before disappearing back towards the light by the ladders.

Only when he was sure Sinclair had gone did John drop his pencil into the crease of his notebook, balanced atop his thighs, and let his face drop into his hands. He moaned in a strange, soul-deep agony, an echo of the ship’s cries. His fingers scorched and nipped against his breath, blisters from the cold refusing to close no matter if Dr Peddie said they should. The next time he was stupid enough to get himself frostbite, Crozier had slurred in his direction, he would see to it that his fingers were cut off. Maybe then he would learn. 

He pushed his sore fingers up through his hair and clawed at his scalp.

 _Pull yourself together, John_ , he admonished himself. _The world is not as you would have it, but it is not for you to decide._ He dragged his fingers back down his face, watched the darkness loom beyond them. _This evil world is only temporary._

His breath shuddered as he rose to his feet.

Temporary. This was all only temporary, he thought as he walked the companionway to his quarters. If it weren’t to be his end then it would make for a fine letter home for his dear Malcolm, or an enthralling chat in Lewis and Katie’s sitting room. He did not usually allow himself to indulge in such hope and nostalgia, but he thought it a reasonable enough balm for his distress for the moment.

It was as he stepped into the passageway that he saw Edward leave the captain’s cabin and pull open the door to his own.

“Lieutenant Little,” he called, ducking his way out of hanging stores. “About the officers’ meeting—”

“There won’t be one today,” he said, turning to him, laboured. “Our captain is—indisposed.”

John stood stooped. Edward had no need. Still he seemed a greater presence, slouched slightly towards the wall with the ship’s incline, his temple resting on the edge of his door. John looked down at his notebook clutched to his middle and rubbed his thumb across its face, wanting desperately not to add to Edward’s growing misery, but seeing no real way around it. It was a shock then, when Edward’s hand came upon his, pushing his notebook away.

“If it’s not good news,” Edward said, the pressure of his hand keeping John’s by his side, “spare me of knowing.”

His mouth twitched around a complaint, but John let himself settle only on, “If you wish.”

Edward raised his hand from John’s notebook to his shoulder, giving it a firm clap. John almost lost his balance under the force of it but steadied himself with an aching hand on the wall. The gaze Edward shot him was curious, but it saddened a moment later. It was ever so easy to lose one’s balance now.

“She’s getting precarious,” Edward said, eyes falling somewhere beyond him, where he could hear the men singing now. _It’ll be bricht both day and nicht when the Greenland lads come hame._ “It won’t be long before—"

“Spare me,” John whispered, an echo.

What a great tragedy it was when an officer must abandon his ship. They shared a sad smile.

*

“A ship’s boy,” Edward said from where he stood, then repeated it, thumping a fist atop a cabinet. “ _A ship’s boy_. What the hell—”

“Edward,” George said gently.

“He should never have left this ship,” he continued, taking a step towards George and stabbing a finger in his direction, “and you know it.” 

“It came _on_ the ship, Edward! This—this _beast_ , whatever it may be, came on this ship and took a man. He was as safe out there as he was in here. We are _all_ as safe in here as we are out there,” George said, then shook his head. “Not that the ice isn’t also consuming us as we speak.”

At that, John finally raised his gaze from the middle-distance. In his left hand he held a teacup, the right too sore, but the tea had long gone cold. He was thinking of—nothing. Nothing that he could discern, anyway, as if his thoughts had been written on the water of rough seas. He looked first at Edward, his palms flat on the table, silenced, and then George, his own tea abandoned. Neither of them was looking at him.

A few hours ago, Crozier had headed to the flagship to speak with Fitzjames alone. It was late. Absent of a captain, Edward could not sleep—would not sleep—until the last of the day’s search parties had returned. John and George found themselves with him in unvoiced solidarity.

“There shouldn’t even _be_ any search parties,” he groused, swaying his body as he leaned on his hands. “They’ll be dead by now. Peddie said so. We will lose more men, more fingers, and more toes, and for what? Our captain’s guilt!”

“Well, at least I know if it should take me, it shan’t be you looking for me.”

Edward swung his body back, head turned to the heavens, swaying in despair. “Be serious, George,” he said to the rafters, palms showing in his plea. He looked down again. “You know this to be nonsense as well as I do.”

“And you wouldn’t expect us to keep looking for you?” George asked.

“I would expect you to act within reason,” he said.

John sucked on his teeth, feeling them firm enough in his gums still. He thought about it. There was a selfish part of him that would like to think that the very bones of him were worth searching for, but he dared not think at what cost. Not another man’s life at least, he concluded. Of that he agreed with Edward, but he would follow his captain’s orders. It seemed the only order they had left.

Where he stood, Edward ran a hand over his face and back through his hair, musing what had been pressed into place by his Welsh wig. John shifted his eyes away, but they rose again when a thumping could be heard from above. Not exactly a raucous, none of them moved until footsteps could be heard clattering down the passageway towards them. Not Gibson or Jopson or Genge, John thought, but—

There was a hurried knock.

“Yes?” George called.

Through the door appeared a rather agitated looking seaman Crispe, red nosed with the snow on his jacket not yet melted from his person. If John remembered correctly, he was not part of the final search party they had been waiting on, but on the last dogwatch.

“Sirs, you need to come up on deck,” he told them. “It’s Strong and Evans.”

John looked at George, who gave Edward a pointed look. 

“ _What?_ ”

“Please, sir,” he said to Edward this time. Beyond him, there was noise beginning to stir in the crew’s quarters. “It’s urgent.”

With one short, exasperated look between the two of them, Edward pulled on his hat. He gestured for them to follow and for Crispe to lead the way. Foregoing their outer clothes, they trailed the seaman up to the main deck and out from the shelter. Through the swirling snow and crowd of men, he could not see it at first. He took a step forward on the icy deck towards the stern and ordered the men to disperse, letting Edward and George step into the circle before him.

“Christ alive,” he heard George say, voice lost a little to the wind.

Edward looked back at him, then forward. John followed the line of his eye to a frozen corpse on the ground. It was cut in two. Not wanting to look, he returned his eyes to Edward, who was now sending him a plea he dared not speak in the knit of his brow and twitch of his lip.

_What do I do?_

“Lieutenant Hodgson,” he began at last, “gather four men to take the bodies down to the sickbay. Wake McDonald and Peddie if you must. Sergeant Tozer, Mr Crispe, I want a full report on what happened here. John—Lieutenant Irving, proceed immediately to _Erebus_ and inform Captain Crozier.”

John felt the wind catch in his throat, choking him. He turned to the white emptiness that separated _Terror_ from her flagship, then turned back.

_Why me?_

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Edward seemed to deflate, shoulders hunching. As John went to move, he brought a hand down on his forearm, as if to pat it, but he clutched at his sleeve instead. “Not on your own, John,” he said, then looked up, scanning the crowd of men that still lingered. “Mr Shanks! You will accompany Lieutenant Irving to _Erebus_. Inform Mr Armitage and retrieve a musket from the armoury.”

John stared down at where Edward’s hand stayed like a vice against arm.

“I’m sorry,” Edward said, “but you’re the only man on this ship I believe God might still protect.”

*

 _Dirtiness_.

He let the word roll around on his tongue, let the _r_ roll like the Navy had taught him not to. Vowels extended like waves; consonants crushed like a ship in ice. It was only savage in the mouth of the pretender, but it simply would not do.

The ship shrieked, cinched at her bow and rising. She had seen more licks of a cat than any man, he ventured, and heard more cries of mercy than God. But not those of Cornelius Hickey. He had been quiet where Hartnell had groaned and Manson had wept, like his mind had left his body, or the Devil had left his vessel. Perhaps she knew, he thought, eyes on her walls, and was purging all evil at the expense of herself.

He shook his head of the thought.

Instead, he pulled off his gloves and gnawed at his fingernails. It hurt. His fingertips were tender against the scratch of his beard. _If you don’t stop that_ , he could almost hear his old nanny say, _you’ll worry them right down to the bone._ He always stopped, but only for a little while.

It was only when he heard the slow, loath steps of the First Lieutenant that he busied his hands with something else—a pocket chronometer, cracked along the glass but still ticking. A fidgety little thing, it could not have been more than two and a half inches across its enamelled face, the silver case nippy to the touch when freezing. It served as a constant, torturous reminder that time still passed here even when the seasons refused to change. That the world was going on without them.

Edward entered the wardroom, letting himself stumble with the incline. He threw a small book upon the table and sank into the chair across from John.

“What is it?” John asked, craning his neck to see.

“A list,” Edward said, which John had deduced, “of volunteers. To berth on _Erebus_.”

John reached over and brought the page of near-illegible scribbles before him. There were a lot of names, he thought, running his finger down the margin. Looking up, he began to ask, “How—”

“All but ten.” 

“ _Oh_.” It came out rather pitifully, without intention. He supposed it was not a surprise, after what happened. Not that John did not believe Crozier was well within his right to—to punish those men as such. To quash the hysteria. To keep them from falling into a chaos from which they could not be revived. “Is the Captain aware?”

Wordlessly, Edward shook his head, but his eyes remained on him, as though he were an axis on which to spin.

John swallowed, hard and audible. If he were a braver man, he thought as he safely set his gaze upon his hands, he would reach out and try to settle him of his every earthly sorrow. Even if he couldn’t, he would reach out anyway, hold him gently, hold him tight. But as it was, he was no such man. Only his duty was on offer. He set his hand upon the list once more.

“I’ll inform him,” he said.

A small, relieved huff escaped Edward. It sent a strange flutter through him. Like the fools he shamed in Archie’s soppy poems, he remembered without reason. The ones that spoke of love.

“I must stop sending you to do my bidding,” Edward said.

Rising to his feet, John told him, “It’s no trouble,” but did not tell him, _not for you_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scottish presbyterian repression hits different, or so i'm told.


	2. there's an end to my horizon

_And the king said unto her, Be not afraid: for what sawest thou? And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth._

It was a demon. It was a demon that spoke with Saul. The Devil in all his wickedness did not have the power to raise a sleeping saint. Lewis had told him that. _But it says Samuel said,_ he remembered stressing, thrusting the bible under his brother’s nose, _and what Samuel said was true_. Lewis, patient as he was pious, had said, _no, John, he was not._ The Lord had departed from Saul; he would not speak to him by dream or by prophet. That was not Samuel. That was the work of the Devil.

Was the Devil in the hold? On the ice?

 _Good grief, stop this_ , John chastised himself, rubbing a mittened hand roughly over his face. It stung. The cold had tinged his nose white before he had realised his scarf had slipped from his face. Sweat had already frozen in his beard.

John readjusted the rifle in his arms.

He was on stern watch. Two weeks before, the creature that had attacked Mr Blanky had snatched Mr Darlington, the caulker, from the very spot on which he stood. They had not found his body. Staring out onto the ice, John could see nothing but the towering pressure ridge than had formed with a creak and boom the day before, looming over the ship like a frozen wave curling and cresting to consume them. It continued to whine.

A clear night, when John turned, he could make out the shape of Thomas Hartnell at his port post, and Thomas Farr, illuminated by the lantern clutched close to his person, by the bow. Only Alexander Berry was out of his sight, obscured by the fallen mast, but his gentle whistling travelled easily in the cold air. Familiar to him, he heard his grandmother’s voice along the wind with its tune, _and mony was the feather-bed that flutter’d on the faem,_ she would sing, _and mony was the gude lord’s son that never mair came hame._

He followed the rush of the wind skyward, towards the nimble men leaping across the purple-black horizon, setting the heavens alight with their violent, merry dance. 

Could they dance all the way to Edinburgh? John was sure they could. Every so often, when he was back home, the sky would fill with the same light that was draped above him now. But it seemed closer here, like he could climb the mast still standing and touch it, but no clutching at the sky atop Blackford Hill would ever do. 

Perhaps, if God permitted it so, he would return to try again.

Maybe he would walk up it, arm-in-arm with Malcolm, and together they would watch the lamplighters do their rounds below as the sky grew dark. Or he would go with Archie, like they did when they were boys, going as far as Archie’s wheezing lungs would allow and sitting to read for hours after. Or, he thought with a hot flare of giddiness, he could show Edward the sun rising from over the North Sea—

“Lieutenant Irving!”

John stumbled, losing his footing on the icy deck. An arm—Hartnell’s arm—was there to keep him upright. The embarrassment, though rife in the colour of his cheeks, was nothing compared to the peculiar, hollow fracture that had ruptured in his chest as the Old Town disappeared into white.

“Sir, the bell’s gone,” Hartnell was telling him.

He stared at Hartnell for a moment, like his face did not fit him. He could not speak for the chattering of his teeth. Instead, he gestured for Hartnell to head towards the sagging canvas, rifle awkwardly tucked in the crook of his arm, and followed him down the hatch.

The lower deck sweltered with the heat from Mr Diggle’s stove. John struggled out of his mittens, thinking it terribly cruel for warmth to seem so unpleasant. He pushed a hand through his hair and found the sweat had begun to thaw from his skin, only to cool again as he reached the chilly officers’ quarters. He removed himself from his slops before going to the wardroom, but kept his scarf wound tight around his neck.

When he entered the wardroom, he found Edward with Dr McDonald. Harry Goodsir, _Erebus_ ’ assistant surgeon that had come over with Lady Silence the month before, was also there, sipping tea gingerly in the corner. 

“How fares it, Lieutenant Irving?” Edward asked.

“Nothing on the ice, sir,” John told him, still standing by the door. He stepped aside when Gibson came up behind him and scuttled past. “But the wind’s well picking up. With snowfall, I don’t suspect we’ll be seeing much of anything.”

He was not to speculate as such, but Edward said nothing of his transgression. Instead, he rubbed a hand over his mouth, forefinger settling along the straight line of his pressed lips. He sighed and briefly moved his hand from his face, gesturing for John to take his seat, then returned it. It did nothing to mask the despairing resentment that held a settled permanence upon his features. 

“We were discussing the possibility of prohibiting any further travelling between ships,” said Dr McDonald.

“And cutting the watches down to an hour,” Edward added. John could feel his eyes on the hands he had clasped atop the table, a fingernail or two now blackened with the blood bursting beneath them. He moved them to his lap. “Are these measures you would support?”

John looked between each of the three men. Really, it was not his place to say, but he agreed, “If the doctors advise it so.”

“Very well,” Edward said, attention turning towards Dr Goodsir. “If you would kindly tell Captain Fitzjames of our decision. He may send his men here, but no Terrors will be leaving this ship.” There was a queer firmness to his voice; strong but havering over the threshold of uncertainty. “Your crossing will be the last until the weather clears. Private Daly will escort you back.”

“I’ll see to it, Lieutenant Little,” Dr Goodsir said, rising to his feet.

Standing after him, Dr McDonald excused himself to assist Dr Goodsir in his packing, but not before telling John, “You must be more careful, Lieutenant Irving,” pressing a hand against his shoulder. “There’s use for your nose yet.”

John buried his nose in the folds of his scarf, embarrassed.

Alone at last, Edward dropped his face into his hands and slouched forward in his seat. John imagined, if he was a somewhat braver man, with far less wretched intentions, he might cross the room and stroke his rotting fingers through his hair, down his back, over his hand. It would be gentle. He would be gentle. 

“Be plain with me, John,” he said after a long moment. “Do you believe I’m doing right by our captain?”

“I believe you are doing right by us all,” John said, deciding words could touch where his hands could not. “A better commander I haven’t yet met.”

*

From the other side of the partition, John could no longer hear singing. 

Fused with brandy, they sang of Christ, their Saviour, being born on this wintertide—ignorant, John suspected, of their own blasphemy. For all his days in the Navy, he had not yet come to understand why such jollity was encouraged, when all such jollity ever invited was sin.

Not that there was much cheer to go around. Bad weather and lamp oil rationing had made Christmas this year a dour, dark affair that even managed to dampen George’s spirits. Mr Diggle had done his best to liven proceedings with a dinner of salt pork, cheese—meticulously carved of mould under Dr Peddie’s supervision—and Lady Jane’s Christmas pudding. The pudding, from what John could remember from years past, had gone down a treat. The singing would surely pick up again when it arrived.

In the meantime, John made use of the quiet by busying himself with his book— _Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation_ , which he had borrowed personally from Lieutenant Fairholme—a finger tracing under each word. He sat in the corner of the sickbay by a table, manning the fort of drowsy men in their hammocks hung from the rafters. They were unlikely to wake, Dr McDonald had told him before parting for the wardroom festivities. Most of them were too weak to do little more than sleep.

How vulnerable mankind was, John thought, and how conceit it could still be.

It was by design, though. Their Creator had made it so. How else could such a harmonious relation exist between all things of this world, if it had not been _planned_? 

Even this place, John surmised as he read, was in and of itself not evil or unplanned. There existed no evil in cold weather, or the Almighty Author would not have made it so. Evil, therefore, only arose when man, ultimately fallible in his constitution, yielded to his inherent tendency of discovery and wandered into the icy tundra not designed for him.

There were hurricanes, but they did not resent the wind. Men drowned, but they did not resent the sea.

It was as he was finishing a chapter, cheek resting on the knuckles of his gloved hand, when Cornelius Hickey entered the sickbay. He sat up immediately and drew the book closer to his person.

“What do you want, Mr Hickey?” he said, mustering a half-hearted sternness.

For a moment, the caulker’s mate did not answer. Instead, he continued in his leisurely stroll around the hammocks, touching them, peering inside to see the sleeping men’s faces, before eventually coming to a stop before the table. He laid his hands atop it, leaning forward. He reeked most unpleasantly of cheap tobacco.

John flinched back.

“Singing, sir,” he said, bringing a waggling finger up to point over his own shoulder. “Satisfies man’s worst urges. You won’t join us?”

“I—” John swallowed. “A little reminder of scripture would not go amiss, Mr Hickey. What you men sing of Christ is a falsehood.” Curling his fingers into the pages of his book, John wetted his lips. “Though I presume that not to trouble you any.”

Hickey grinned. His head cocked. He drew a small pattern on the table with his finger, nail scraping the surface.

“You see,” he began, “I would have thought celebrating our Saviour would be something you’d be partial to—among other things.” John narrowed his eyes on Hickey, but it only served him as fuel to continue. “Men forget for who they should be thankful for in places like this, sir. It’s a welcome reminder for all, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

John shook his head.

“It is nothing more than a reminder of man’s inadequacies, Mr Hickey. Man was given the Sabbath for a reason. Scripture clearly denotes how we may serve Him—and it is not through this Papist nonsense.”

The sharper John’s tone, the sharper Hickey’s smile seemed to grow. Like a knife, John thought, skewering through his chest where his heart was thumping wildly. His shamelessness too perforated the air like a toxin and clung to John’s lungs like tar, constricting them, making it impossible to breathe. He so desperately wanted Hickey to leave.

“Such a shame, Lieutenant,” Hickey said at last, leaning in ever closer. “I’m sure you have such a lovely voice.”

He drew the book to his chest, as though it might protect him.

Then, suddenly, there came a voice that would.

“Mr Hickey! I do believe I heard your name for next dogwatch.” _Edward_. “I would be prompt if I were you.”

“That time already, sir?” he asked.

He spoke over his shoulder, then turned back to John, a self-assured little smirk on his face. The grease in his hair shined in the lantern’s yellowish light. Again, he made no move to leave until Edward added a warning of, “With haste, Mr Hickey,” that caused his body to straighten and turn. He departed under Edward’s watchful eye, fingers dancing over hammocks as he went.

Edward shut the partition door behind him.

“I have good reason to believe that man has never caulked anything in his life,” Edward said, pausing to stand over the hammock in which David Leys slept. He curled a hand over its edge and did not look at John when he added, “Though I suppose it matters little now.” 

John finally eased his book back to the table from his chest.

“She won’t float?” he asked, though he already knew the answer. He had seen the dislodged planks and timbers by the bow of the hull. She would surely sink if she ever saw open water again. The ice, once cruel, had become a mercy.

Finally, Edward looked at him. Not long off watch, he stood clutching his Welsh wig as stubborn ice clung to his sideburns. Face flushed, the skin of his nose and cheeks were stained a gleaming red from the harsh winds outside. Were it possible, John would reach out and set his hands upon his face so that he may have the heat from his palms. It was the only thing of any little value left to him.

“Mr Honey thinks not,” Edward told him.

Hardy and intrepid as she was, to hear it was a great sorrow. John looked around, then down, mourning. As if she knew, she gave a great wail of her crushing timbers. His eyes once again found Edward when the howling passed.

“John,” he said, then hesitated. “John, would you mind terribly if I joined you? George is—he’s got that terrible racket on again, and I—I would just very much like some peace.”

It was not fondness, John knew well enough, that brought Edward here, but still a strange thrill burst and bloomed in his chest where Hickey had once left fear. He gestured for Edward to sit and watched him take a chair from where it hung from its hook on the wall. It gave a terrible screech when dragged across the tilted floor.

Edward sighed when he finally sat, traipsing ever closer.

“What are you reading?”

With a hand suddenly struck with a delicate tremor, John pushed the book between them. Edward placed his own atop its open pages and closed the cover over to reveal its name to himself. Noticing no author, he gave a small hum and let it fall open once more.

“Do you trust a man that does not put his name to his words?” he asked.

John cleared his throat. “I dare say if I were a man that tried to rid nature of its miracles, I would not let the world know of my name either,” he told him. “Still, every man must be heard—even those weak in faith.”

“What I would not give for a miracle,” Edward said, then leaned closer, and together they read.

*

Caught at her stern, _Erebus_ was not in nearly as precarious a position as _Terror_ , but John found himself on no even keel. Down on the orlop deck, notebook on his lap, he sat atop a crate and steadied himself with a grip on its edge and his foot against another. Beside him, his lantern hissed against the cold air bleeding through the walls. 

John shivered.

He could go to the wardroom. Lieutenant Le Vesconte had told him as much when he had arrived for his meeting with Mr Gregory, and even sent Seaman Wentzall down to remind him of his offer an hour later, but John had declined. He did not feel like partaking in conversations with his fellow officers—especially not when Jacko, his little friend and thief, was no longer there to keep him company. It hardly seemed worth it without her.

Instead, he stayed by himself, adding what he had counted in _Erebus’_ stores with that on _Terror_. It did not make for particularly pleasant reading, he thought, worrying the skin of his thumb between his teeth. _Seven hundred and fifty pounds of salt beef total,_ he calculated, scribbling the number down. _Two hundred and ten of pork._

It read like a death foretold.

How strange it was, then, to hear the news of Carnivale.

“And you thought not to question it?” John asked Edward as he followed him up the companionway. “I thought I made our present situation perfectly clear to Captain Fitzjames—”

Edward stopped abruptly and turned. He looked tired. If the hand he placed on John’s shoulder was only to keep himself upright, John would not have been all that surprised. Not that John offered much support. He sank with it, as if Edward had passed him the weight of the world. _I would carry it for you_ , he thought, _but please do not ask me to_.

“John,” he said, giving him a bit of a shake, “it will do well for the men’s spirits. Mr Blanky endorses it.”

As if on cue, a merry cheer rose from behind John. While in an earlier meeting with Mr Helpman, he had heard George give the order for a trunk of costumes to be moved up from the hold. He had thought little of it until now.

“Mr Blanky is not the man these men will turn Devil against when they are starving,” John said, hurried and low.

Edward sighed. His grip on John’s shoulder tightened, fingers flexing.

“I am to head over there now,” Edward began, guiding John like a marionette closer to him, hunching. “Should anything concern me, I will be sure to voice such worries to Captain Fitzjames,” he said, which John knew to be true. He would not allow for things to get out of hand, if not in his own name, then in Captain Crozier’s. He gave him another shake. “I promise you that, John.”

John nodded without a word.

“Mr Gibson, if you would kindly fetch my slops!” called over John’s shoulder suddenly.

Peering over his own shoulder, John saw Gibson standing at the bottom of the companionway. He was not alone. At the sight of Cornelius Hickey, John turned back around and resisted the tempting urge to hide himself away in the crook of Edward’s neck. He would surely be safe from him there.

“Like George said, your cheer need not be sincere,” Edward said, turning his attention back to John. He seemed as surprised as any to be relaying George’s advice. “Just visible.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Come if you wish,” he said, finally letting his hand fall from John’s shoulder and taking a step back, “but I thought your lot loved welcoming in the new year.”

It was no false assumption. Back home, Christmas passed unceremoniously, but the year died with all due spectacle. Filled with oatcakes and whisky, he would wander from whatever gathering he found himself—never hosted by his father—to Tron Kirk. It seemed busier on the midnight of each new year than it had ever done on any noon John had known of it. For an hour or so, the long, dark winter’s night seemed to break.

It seemed this one never would.

“Hogmanay,” he said, a slight water to his throat. “It’s called Hogmanay.”

With another clap of his hand to his arm, Edward let him be. Standing in the passageway, he looked back at where Hickey had stood, then to the door of the Great Cabin. _Damn it all_ , he thought. _I need a drink_.

*

As a child, in the November cold, John would watch effigies of Guy Fawkes burn. He remembered how his mother held him close as the heat licked his frozen cheeks, the embers fell like snow, and the bonfire towered over him like Hell had been raised from the ground.

Carnivale was no different.

Rocking himself steadily, he watched in morbid fascination as the canvas and rigging and costumes were consumed in the inferno before him. Around it, ice hissed as it steamed and melted, smoothing down the edges of lofty seracs to provide dozens of mirror images of flames climbing skywards into the dark night. He could feel sweat begin to saturate his own face and body from the heat of it all. It was making his skin itch.

It was true, for the most part, that sailors feared nothing more than fire. At sea, tales of Captain Morgan and HMS _Oxford_ haunted many a young man’s dreams. Ravenous, in the ship’s small, hollow spaces it ate through planks and timbers like a starving man, fighting gasping sailors for oxygen. If they did not burn, then they would certainly drown.

But there was no carelessness here. No gunpowder or intentions _to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains_ , as welcome a return as it might be. It was no straw effigy that burned, but a man. A troubled man and deeply so. John stared upon the charred remains of Dr Stanley with a strange invention of sorrow and scorn, troubled to his bones how little a man of medicine could place on the value and dignity of human life.

Unless—unless he knew _something_ —

“John,” George said, off to his side. His wig was in his lap. He looked as though he had seen a dead man walk. “John, you’ve lost your wings.”

John held himself tighter around the middle, no carefully clasped hands keeping him from the flames. _Don’t get too close, darling_ , he heard his mother say, her voice carrying on Arctic winds. How clear it seemed to be, as if she stood just behind him. He dared not look. If he should not find her there, he was certain he would be sick—though perhaps that was just the rum, or the smell of burning flesh in the air.

He tried to hide his unease when Crozier approached.

“Go back to the ship, John,” Crozier said, curling a hand over his shoulder, “she’s without an officer.”

“Aye, Captain,” he said, saluting.

But for the men in the sickbay and watch, by the time he had taken the well-trodden path back, he was the only soul that had returned to _Terror_. A shorter journey, the rest were sent to take roll aboard _Erebus_. Edward was overseeing that, he was vaguely aware, whilst George had been put in charge of the bodies. Queasily lowering himself into his bunk, cabin swimming around him in his half-sober state, he counted Crozier’s orders as a mercy.

He wanted so desperately to sleep, but he could not sleep without scripture.

With a blind hand, he retrieved his Bible from where it rested beneath his pillow. It felt heavier than usual, he thought, opening it with a strange disinclination. He read only one chapter, until— _for who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? for who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?_

In his dreams, Edinburgh was bathed in rare winter sunlight.

From atop Arthur’s Seat, John watched the waters of the firth glitter below. He was sat in the grass, damp with frost, small stones displaced under his feet. Gravity threatened to take him down as the wind battered his cheeks in its honest frustration; so close to God, he thought, looking up, yet so very far away.

What great care with which his city had been designed, he often thought. Carved by glaciers and set beside the sea. Built up in stone by the best of man. Fumigated of obscenities of old.

But John knew, deep in his soul, that it was not for its beauty that he longed for this place. He had seen the world, he had lived in it, but it had left him with only one thought: _is this it? Is this all?_ What a strange imitation the rest of the world had proved to be, on each of its corners, fashioning itself as a place he could live, but never quite call home.

No, there was only this.

Without the fear of falling, he scrambled around the side to look westwards, where the castle sat upon a rocky crag and his home sat below. He could not see it, but it was fixed in his memory, mapped in its place, just beyond the quoined steeple of St. Cuthbert’s.

And then the fog rolled in.

Much too cold for the haar to travel over land from the sea, this fog descended from the heaven of grey clouds that painted a permanent gloom over the mountains beyond. Where grey sky ended, and fog started, John could not be sure. But he did not move for it. He retreated only as far as the first levelling ground and took rest there. Laid back and watched the sun disappear. Let the grey haze consume him like smoke but soaking him right through to the bones and heart.

 _Has anyone every drowned in the mist,_ he thought, _or does the sea always do its bidding?_

He was not to know, for someone was dragging him from home.

_No, no, no._

“John—John, wake up, you’ve got watch. It’s—”

Once more, the grey fog dissipated, leaving only Edward in the field of his vision. At the sight of him—at the sight of his wretched little cabin, stuck at the end of the world—John brought his wrist to his mouth to stop himself from weeping as he sat.

He was acutely aware of the thud of his Bible hitting the floor.

Edward knelt to retrieve it.

With wet eyes on Edward, he dug his teeth into the fabric of his jacket, felt them still firm in his gums. The pain of home being ripped from his reality was so scorching, like bare skin against ice, that he thought he might prefer it. Lord, dig out every tooth from my mouth, he prayed, just never let me think of home again.

*

Edward had been hurt in the fire.

Not enough, though, to think of taking any proper time for rest. _Much to do_ , he would say, raising the hand of his uninjured arm to pat John’s shoulder as he passed. Despite John’s ever more selfish worrying, he was right, and not least because he had volunteered himself to lead the first walking party south. 

“I don’t see what help it will do to send a party ahead,” John said to George as he paced the wardroom, dinner of biscuits abandoned. “Not when that—that _thing_ is out there.”

“I thought I did a splendid job on the old beast with the canon,” George said.

John stilled and stared at him through the lingering smoke from his pipe, wondering if he should acknowledge such a pointless remark or not. No, he decided, and instead bade farewell to George with a promise to return shortly. He did not know entirely what he planned on doing until he stepped down into the men’s quarters and continued on towards the sickbay, the steepening decline towards the bow forcing him to put a hand out and brace himself against the thin wall.

Both Dr McDonald and Dr Peddie had perished at Carnivale. Clannish, though by profession not name, John had never been particularly close to either. Often, as he had grown to be with Malcolm, he became acutely aware of his own ignorance in their presence, and it was never much something he enjoyed. But still, he missed them and mourned them as brethren, finding himself increasingly alone in his fire and brimstone fears.

Only Dr Goodsir manned the sickbay now.

“Lieutenant Irving,” he said, his accent born in Fife but tailored in Edinburgh. It carved something ever deeper into John’s chest. “May I help you with something?”

“I—” John began, then stopped. He startled slightly at the sight of Jacko laid out on the table before Dr Goodsir, bumping into a cabinet behind him. She was quickly covered. “I came to inquire about Lieutenant Little,” he told him. “Has he been—been—”

“He’s been to see me, yes—reluctantly so,” he said. “Under the Captain’s orders, I can only presume."

His eyes wandered around the sickbay. It was full once more, but the men not dosed did not sleep. Instead, the laid awake and still, each movement a pain in their joints. The previous evening Edward had made comment about how difficult it was to find a sufficient number of men fit enough to etch out a path before the others. The situation on _Erebus_ , for once, was no better.

John knew better now than to offer a prayer.

“And you, Lieutenant?” Dr Goodsir said, moving around the table and taking a step towards him. He was gesturing towards—his hand, fidgeting by his side. The gauze around his fingers and palm had become ratty and loose. “Would you like me to change that?”

Saying nothing, John nodded.

“Please, take a seat.”

John sat atop the table furthest from where Jacko rested and began to unravel his bandage. He grimaced down at the sight of it and winced when Dr Goodsir lifted his hand closer to the light for inspection.

“Quite a nasty one,” he said. “How ever did you manage it?”

“Down in the hold, I tripped over a rat and touched the water tank by accident,” he told him, a strange heat filling his cheeks. “Silly of me, really.”

“To go down to the hold without gloves?” he asked, leaving John to retrieve some sort of ointment from the shelf.

John frowned. That would be rather silly, he thought. But why would he— “I guess I must have forgotten,” he said, though he soon came to wish he never had, judging by the soft frown on the doctor’s forehead that mirrored his own.

Dr Goodsir set aside the ointment.

“Do you find yourself forgetting other things, Lieutenant?”

John wanted to laugh at the mere thought, but instead he sobbed, dry, into the open palm of his better hand. He kept it there, smothering himself to silence as Dr Goodsir stepped back. It was his turn to be alarmed, but it did not keep. He closed the distance between them again and picked up the ointment, letting John moan quietly into his hand at the sting as he began to dap it on his fingers. He paid little mind to his tears.

“All I seem to do is remember,” John said when he finally pulled his hand away. “And when I wake up, I remember that I’m here, in this place, and I just—I can barely stand it.”

Wrapping the bandage around his hand, Dr Goodsir did not look at him as he said, “Debility and nostalgia are very common—”

“Oh, for the love of God, Doctor,” he pleaded, forcing Dr Goodsir to look at him, “just say scurvy.”

“Scurvy,” he said, like an announcement to the room. One man groaned, shifting in his hammock. “I dare say use it,” he continued. “There is very little else out there to walk towards but a memory of home—even Lieutenant Gore said we are all orphans here.”

Perhaps they were. There was no way of knowing without such tidings. John thought of his father’s face, not too dissimilar to his own, and wondered briefly, when the time came, who would be adjudged to have worn the name John Irving better. _Not me_ , he thought, _I have done nothing with all I have ever been given. Even my name._

“Do you believe we’ll make it home?” John asked.

“If Captain Crozier thinks it so,” Dr Goodsir answered him, finally finished with the dressing. “And if not in body, then in soul.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you want to know how committed i am to this fic [i climbed arthur's seat](https://ableseamen.tumblr.com/post/627435848610283520/went-up-arthurs-seat-decked-it-twice-they-big) for some of that authentique edinburgh nostalgia. dundee > edinburgh tho.


	3. the fog has cast a shadow homeward

For a time, he thought it best not to say farewell.

Despite years of opportunity, he had never quite mastered the art of it—of man’s most evil lot. It was a strange misfortune of mankind, he had often thought, that they must always be doomed to a final parting, whether they spoke of it or not. The best one could hope for, he had mentioned to Malcolm once, was that if their paths should no longer cross, then they might run parallel instead. Beside each other, close, but never to meet again.

 _Until_ , Malcolm had added, a hand on his arm, _we are forever returned to each other in Heaven, redeemed by God’s good grace._

He could almost, with a heavy heart, wait for the world beyond this earthly one to be reunited with his dearest friend, but he found himself much less patient when it came to Edward. Perhaps, he surmised, because God had nothing to do with it. Edward’s presence was no blessing inclined to him, no mercy from loneliness as Malcolm had been. He was something entirely different.

 _But what?_ John thought.

Not a temptation. God was faithful, and He would not let him suffer beyond what he was capable enough to endure. Was it even suffering, though, this longing? Was it not what mankind wept to feel, even for an hour or so? To love on earth, in this corrupted body, was futile in its impermanence, but a glorious endeavour all the same.

Temporary and magnificent, that was what it was. The blessing and the curse of this life before the next one.

John so much wanted to feel its magnificence.

In the Great Cabin, the night before Edward was due to depart for King William Land, they held what would be their last meeting, altogether, aboard _Terror_. Like a mother by the harbour, she cried for their parting. _Do not go_ , John imagined she might say if her crushing timbers could talk. _And if you must go, come back._ _With me is where you are safe._

Safe, but not home.

 _Frozen ships are good shelters, but they are not our homes_. That was what Crozier had said, he remembered, before telling the men that they would be abandoning ship and heading south. Up Back’s Fish River and on towards Fort Resolution. John’s eyes dropped to the map on the table before him. He sucked on the teeth loosening in his gums. It seemed so very far away.

Though Crozier was speaking now, John was not listening. Shifting his eyes from the map, he found Edward’s face again, dutifully turned towards their captain. He looked tired. His stubble was thick and his sideburns thicker. Once neat, his hair curled towards his cheek and flicked from his brow, almost inky black under the grease that weighted it.

And yet, John thought, fists tightening in his lap, he had never been more handsome.

A heat warmed his cheeks. He looked away and down at his hands. His bandage made it impossible to wear under gloves on his right hand and he had felt it through his mittens on his last watch. He flexed his fingers. The chronometers had been a nightmare that morning. More of his nails had started to bruise. The skin beneath his cuticles never ceased bleeding.

 _Do be careful_ , Dr Goodsir had said, _nothing will fix itself anymore._

“—and Mr Watson will be over this hour tomorrow to assist with the sledges. You’ll brief him, John?”

John did not come back to himself right away. He lifted head, slow, like one might move in a dream. Crozier, with his eyes and skin no longer waxy, did not look particularly irked by his lack of attention, and waited for him to pull himself from the trenches of his own thoughts. He set his clasped hands on the table when he did.

“Of course, sir,” he said, mouth dry around his words.

Across the table, George and Edward exchanged a glance, but they did not look at him.

“Well, men, that settles business,” Crozier said, turning his eyes to Mr Blanky, then back. “Edward, get a good night’s rest and I’ll be sure to see you and the men off in the morning.” Crozier was smiling as he sat back, and Edward gave a gracious nod of his head. “With any luck, you’ll meet Lieutenant Fairholme going the other way before you reach land.”

“I shall keep an eye out, sir,” Edward said easily.

If he did or did not believe it a possibility, John could not entirely tell. He prayed it so. He still had books to return to the other lieutenant.

Bidding Crozier goodnight, they each left the room, leaving Mr Blanky and Jopson behind. Slightly out of sorts, frowning at why returning books to Lieutenant Fairholme had seemed so important to him just a moment before, John was heading to his cabin when Edward caught his arm. He knew it was him. He could tell the weight of his touch without looking.

Turning, John saw George enter the wardroom behind where they stood.

“You’ll have a drink with us, won’t you?” he asked.

Though he knew better, he agreed and followed Edward back down the passageway. Closing the door behind him, John thought of calling for Gibson, but George had already begun to pour three glasses of brandy—brought up from his personal stores—by the time he had arrived. It was Edward that pressed it into his hand.

“John?” George prompted.

“Yes,” he said, “to a safe journey south—and absent friends,” he added, remembering it a Sunday. The Sabbath. He clinked his glass and cringed as he drank, throat scorched for his transgression. “Good grief.”

“It’s quite something,” George said, eyeing the bottle on the table. “A few of those and you’d be walking for miles. Or not far at all.”

“We’ll be doing so regardless,” Edward reminded him, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, grimacing as though they burned. “I only count myself lucky to leave her unabandoned,” he said, though it brought no ounce of joy to his words. “I pray the sight is not too heavy a one for you to carry onward.”

“I shan’t be looking back at her.”

John nodded in agreement, light with the thought of knowing himself in Edward’s prayers.

 _Only in his embrace would do better_ , he thought much later that night, thawing cold sheets with the warmth of his own body. He read barely a line of Scripture that evening, and his soul was aflame with the unease of it, the heat prickling uncomfortable under his skin. Worse only was the heat behind his eyes, building itself to a headache as he tried not to cry. He cradled himself close.

In the morning, saturated with fatigue, he stood atop the ice ramp and watched the first sledge party ready themselves below. It did not seem real, like what was unfolding beyond him was a pantomime or play. In fact, it was only when Edward waved to him that he snapped from his dreamlike stupor and descended onto the ice.

Not quite dressed for it, he shivered, teeth chattering. In a painful grip, he shook Edward’s hand and decided, for definite, that this was no time for goodbyes, only blessings.

“May God be with you.”

*

Edward had been correct in his supposition—he was a lucky man and officer not to bear witness to the abandoning of his ship.

That morning, Saturday the 22nd day of April, in the year of our Lord 1848, John neatened his cabin, collected his personals, and disembarked HMS _Terror_ for the final time. In their shared grief, she gave one final shriek of her timbers and John patted her gunwale goodbye. But there was little time for mourning. _Much to do_ , Edward would say, mirage of him disappearing into the glittering light where the sun touched the ice. John peeled his eyes, shielding them with a mitten-clad hand.

A little while later, as he was checking the canvas fastenings on the boats, aided by Mr Peglar, John heard it: the order to abandon ship. It pinged through the cold air, first in Captain Crozier’s voice, then in George’s, then in Mr Farr’s. George, the most senior officer left on _Terror_ with Edward gone, was accompanying Crozier through protocol—but he would give him time to bid her farewell on his own.

A captain must do that alone.

Even Captain Fitzjames, who had said his own farewell to _Erebus_ , had distanced himself from the crowd of men when the order came. Only he knew the enormity of the indignity.

“Remember, John,” George said to him, clapping a hand down on his shoulder as he walked past, “no looking back.”

And so he never did. Once he had given the order to move forward, he dared not look back at the pitiful sight of _Terror_ stuck in her icy casket. Not even when he assumed it to be safe, the snow obscuring all around them, did he turn in the direction from which they came. He only looked forward, following the fading sledge trails of Edward’s party through the ever-shifting pack ice, wondering what he might say when they met again.

_Oh, how I have longed to see you, and only in this life would seeing you suffice._

The first night, they stopped in a valley of ice ridges. John watched as George warmed a tin of soup above the little spirit stove. It never came to a boil. He stared at what had been spooned into his bowl until it went cold. His stomach had no want for it, and nor did his spirit.

For the time, he considered himself unworthy of such necessities.

He stumbled to his tent to pray. Thoughts, cares, and pleasures of this life abandoned, he sought God in earnest. His hands ached in the grip of one another. The cold of the ice below him rose through his knees.

 _Lord_ , he prayed, _I am at the lion’s mouth. I fear none of these bodily perils, but the Devil’s malice tortures me so. You permit his rage, such is Your power, but when, Lord, shall Your glory eclipse his evil? In Your puissant hand is where I long to be moved and cradled, comforted, and delivered from all ills. I hold no doubt, only impatience._

He cried like a little one before his Father.

It was not, he soon realised, only the ache in his soul that kept him awake that night. In the glow of a small fire he pulled the collar of his jumper from his neck and looked down at the mottled skin beneath it. Some, he knew, had been there before, but others had been caused on the journey. New bruises followed along the impression of his harness. He pressed a finger to each of them to prove them real.

A fitful sleep left him tired in the new morning, like a punishment for the dreams he might have had of Edward. A small mercy, they were not to move off just yet.

“What do you suppose Sergeant Tozer and Seaman Morfin saw?” George asked as they had breakfast.

This time, John ate, but he had no answer for George.

“I don’t suppose it’s the creature,” the other lieutenant continued. “More of an alarm would have been raised if it were. We’d have been informed and armed immediately. And the marines, well, you know what they are like after what that _thing_ did to Bryant and Heather.” John grimaced at the memory of both. “They certainly wouldn’t let it rest.”

John put a finger in his mouth to check a loose tooth. He pulled it out again, rubbing spittle and blood between his thumb and forefinger. “Best not to speculate,” he said, licking the metallic taste from his gums.

“Little else to do,” George huffed, then immediately perked up. “There they are now.”

Following the line of George’s gaze, John saw Crozier, Fitzjames, Tozer and Morfin appear from behind a towering serac. They all seemed a little whiter in the face than they had left, though it might just have been the exhaustion. God only knew how he was going to fair on another nine miles of ice.

“Looks like they’ve seen a ghost,” George said, but it prompted no rage in him this time. “The Devil must be close.”

*

No sooner had they arrived at Terror Camp, John dropped like a dead man to sleep.

The last day on the ice had been the worst. Where the pack ice met the frozen gravel of King William Land, a great barrier of ice had been formed. Standing beneath it, he had watched both captains haul themselves up its craggy side, but he felt nothing when they returned with news of the camp’s proximity. They would still have to get over it first.

As he climbed, he imagined home on the other side. He imagined Edinburgh in the spring sunshine, the cobbled streets warm and the Water of Leith glittering. Malcolm would be there waiting for him, he thought, puffing out his cheeks as he pulled. Everything inside of him felt raw, like the cold air was scarping down his throat and lungs with every breath that he took. It hurt to cough, but not nearly as much as the crushing reality settling into his bones when his dear city did not appear.

He gave an odd moan of distress, then continued his way down.

In the officer’s tent, he crawled into the three-man sleeping bag and let the new heat lay siege against his body. It caused him to tremble, but it did not ward off any sleep.

Soon he would sleep no more. Death, the only worldly defence left to him in the wake of such a cross of affliction, would be an eternal awakening. He would know lethargy no more, and no nightmare or aching dream of home would ever touch him. Forever he would be awake, basking in the glory of the Lord, like having his face perpetually turned to the sun.

But not yet.

John stirred, sensing movement. His body was stiff where he lay, his shoulder pressing through to the rough ground below. He turned to find Edward. George was moving somewhere beyond him, on the other side. He blinked.

“It seems God has seen us through,” Edward said, then quieter, “For now, at least.” 

He was rested on his side, knees tucked high. Like orphans they were, Goodsir had said. Little ones lost in a place not intended for them. John had stared at the flag that rose above their camp and wondered if it belonged there. He was beginning to think maybe it didn’t. 

“It appears to have been His intention, yes,” John told him.

Beside his face, his hand rested. So close were they, if he stretched out his fingers he might find the slope of Edward’s nose with his fingertips. But he was not quite brave enough to try. Instead, he pulled his hand back and curled a tight fist against his chest, safe. He did not look from Edward’s eyes. Edward did not look from his. He unclenched his fist.

Edward nestled his cheek into his pillow. “It’s much better with you here,” he said. “Warmer.”

John could feel it. The combined heat of their three bodies, all trapped between the heavy sleeping bag, was doing wonders against the cold wind that unsettled the tarred canvas of their tent. So hot was he, John could feel the itch of wool against his sweaty skin as he moved, shifting his body from its stupor. Warmer still, to his shame, was the lick of heat down his loins.

The flesh was weak. John knew this for God had made it so. It was his unwilling spirit that caused him great pain.

He swallowed and said, “We weren’t meant for this world alone.”

“God made us so?” Edward said, though it sounded more like a question than any statement made in faith. “It seems a great cruelty.”

Was solitude a crueller fate than parting? John was not so sure. It was better to be alone, and always be alone, he thought, than know of great company and have it leave you. That only made you lonely. He had contented himself with loneliness once before, but only for a while. Now, it felt like a delusion. It was the greatest trick he had ever played on himself: thinking he was not absolutely and unequivocally miserable.

John rolled onto his back and pushed the damp hair from his forehead. Scurvy had not yet crowned him with thorns, but he felt them on the inside.

“If life were not so cruel, for what reason would you look forward to the next one?”

Turning only his face towards him, John watched Edward ponder the question. Though quite lost beneath the beard he had started to grow, his dry lips were pursed in thought. John wondered what it might feel like to press his thumb to them, feeling the damp inner edge of his lip. He wondered if his cold hands might still feel them at all.

_But with my lips—_

“I suppose,” Edward said at last. “Still, what a misery it is.”

Misery had indeed placed a great weight on Edward, and he wore it like a shroud over his person. But it was exactly that: _placed_. It was the world that had burdened him with such misery; John had only himself to blame.

*

They had only once gone to the beach as a family.

It had been at Inverbervie, and the pebble and shingle beach had followed the satisfying curve of the coastline of the bay as his mother had recalled it. Steep at its northern end, it levelled out into a stony esplanade quilted by seaweed left by the last high tide. Beyond it, the North Sea stirred in its silent wintry rage, the breaking waves white as snow on the wind.

The fresh air was to do his mother good.

His father, though present, had kept himself to the higher ground with George and Mary, each of them in varying degrees of protest. Lewis, perhaps the most settled in his acceptance, skipped stones across the water when it calmed, Archibald a shadow behind him, trying to find the flattest stones. His mother, barefooted and clutching her skirt, was walking along the water’s edge. Alexander was beside her with a waiting arm, making sure both she and David, who was squealing in strange delight at the waves lapping up to his knees, kept upright.

John, dutifully clutching both David and his mother’s shoes to his chest, had trudged behind them all the entire way, keeping his eyes on the sea and his mother. _Be careful_ , he thought, though the air around them was clear, _or it’ll come to take you away from me_. 

So precious was the memory, he had never tried to recreate it in watercolour or otherwise. It would not suffice, he thought, but that was never really it. It was, as he knew now, because it was for no one else to see.

No eyes need see it. No soul need know.

“It weren’t far from the shore, sir,” Hartnell said suddenly, pulling him from his thoughts. “Half a mile or so, Lieutenant Gore reckoned.”

Of the party from the previous year, John was supposed to be accompanied by Mr Peglar to locate the cairn’s position from Terror Camp, but the little captain of the foretop had taken unwell on the journey across the ice. Hartnell, in what John considered a quite admirable redemption, had volunteered his services in his place.

John looked west.

Along the coast, the pack ice continued to grind itself against land, great chunks of ice tumbling down the side of it like an avalanche. As they crunched their way across the gravel of the wind-battered wasteland that was King William Land, they had wandered inland to avoid the snow blowing down from the great icy ridge.

Underfoot felt like a pebbled shore.

He had only gone back once, as an adult, during a short stint on leave. No one—not even Malcolm—knew of where he planned to go and what he planned to do. Not that it was particularly scandalous. On the grassy slope, he abandoned his shoes and socks and rolled his trouser legs to his calves. It was a painful, perilous trek to the sea, the rocks sharp and slippery under his feet, but a great relief when he got there.

Yes, the world was reborn clean out of an ark, but it had been the water that cleansed it. _And everything that is in the earth shall die_ , he thought, looking around. There was little for God to dispose of here, only them.

“There it is, sir,” Hartnell said then, pointing into the distance.

John retrieved his telescope and looked for himself. Though not where he believed Sir James Ross’ cairn to be, there it was, strange against the landscape. From afar, it did not seem like it had been touched. When he passed his telescope carefully off to Hartnell, he confirmed his assumption of the same. The cairn was not three miles from Terror Camp.

Moving a stone from atop the cairn, he reached inside to retrieve it. Whether it was in his orders or not, John took the note from the canister to read it. Hartnell read by his shoulder.

“ _All well_?” he muttered. “It don’t even mention my brother.”

“An inadvertent oversight, I am sure, Mister Hartnell,” John said, voice stuck in his throat. He thought of Beechey Island. They had left no note, only bodies. “Or perhaps not.”

He quickly rolled the paper back up and tucked it away again.

It was around dinnertime by the time they returned to camp. Upon getting there, John went straight to the captain’s tent, taking Hartnell with him, if only to tell Crozier, “It was Mister Hartnell that first set eyes on the cairn, sir. His orienteering skills are an asset to the Discovery Service,” after he had thanked him. Crozier gave them each a grateful nod.

Stepping from the tent, John pulled on his cap and looked around. He walked in the opposite direction of which he seen Mr Hickey.

Thankfully, though, he was to find Edward in his haste of leaving. Edward held him by the elbow where they stood, looking rather pleased to see him. It did terribly things to his heart and stomach.

“There you are,” he said. “How did you fare?”

“The note is in the possession of the captains as we speak,” he said, holding himself a little straighter now, basking in Edward’s attention.

Letting go of his elbow at last, Edward brought his hand to John’s shoulder and gave him a congratulatory jostle. “Good man,” he said, hand lingering. “Good to hear.”

Perhaps, if he were of sounder mind, he might not have reached up to touch Edward’s forearm, but he did. Beneath his tender fingertips, the wool of Edward’ coat was rough to the touch but warmed by the residual heat from his body. John curled his bandaged hand into the material. Edward made no move to stop him. They both held on for dear life.

*

There was still blood on the rocks.

They were glazed with it, shining in the morning light and not quite frozen from the close heat of the fire. John reached into his coat and took the pewter bottle of drinking water from it. Having been close to his person for most of that fitful night, it was mostly melted. Taking one sip for himself, he poured the rest over the bloody rocks, washing some free of it, but diluting the rest.

He could still hear the shot that killed John Morfin. That was his name—John. John had known, of course, vaguely, but for a moment, in his own quiet madness, he had thought Crozier was talking to him. _You’ll never get yourself back to Edinburgh if you don’t try everything._ Rifle in hand, he had wanted to scream, _I go back there every night and wake to this godforsaken place_ , but he would not have meant it.

God was here.

He knew this above all things.

He knew too to patiently tolerate the Lord’s deliverance to his end, remembering that Christ Himself had entered into His kingdom by troubles and pains unknown to the common man. And even He, most lamentably, had said upon His cross, _My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?_ So John despaired little, for it was only a sign of his election in Christ’s blood, embedded in his body.

He hoped Morfin, in his own agony, had not forgotten this.

“Lieutenant Irving?” John did not immediately turn towards Jopson’s voice, but instead waited until he arrived at his side. “Lieutenant, Captain Crozier requires your presence in the command tent for a meeting forthwith,” Jopson told him. “Is everything alright, sir?”

Finally, John lifted his eyes from the rocks.

“Perfectly so,” he said.

Though neither of them believed it, Jopson had the good grace to take him at his word.

It was for his geniality that John found great joy in the news of Jopson’s promotion. Perhaps, if it were anyone else, he would feel quite aggrieved that a man without his experience and training was now at ranks with him—but John felt no displeasure or impudence, for what had been done had been right. The Lord’s justice had been made known once more.

Or, he thought, maybe it was the press of Edward’s hand to his thigh that had so dispelled him of his grievances, leaving him only a man of his own flesh, wanting and delighted. It had been quick and firm, as Edward had always laid his hands upon him, but there was something different about the way his gloved fingers curled into the sore muscle of his leg. Something definite. Something _divine_.

“John, are you quite well?”

As they left, Edward stopped John with a hand to his side, fingers splayed over his flank. He backed him around to the other side of the tent where the land opened out beyond them. In the distance, all was still. A fog loomed. John stared emptily between the horizon and Edward’s hand, his mouth hanging slightly ajar.

“News of the tins aside,” he premised, “quite so.”

“Be serious,” Edward said. His hand dropped with his brow a moment later. His fingers flexed by his sides. “I haven’t—I haven’t offended you, have I?”

For what would I be offended by? John wondered. Not for his hands on him—no, never that, or thinking him unwell. His concern was well founded. John was still alive in his own body enough to know that he no longer carried himself the same way, with the same vigour. He knew he looked tired. The only thing left was—

“Have you blasphemed?”

For a moment, Edward’s apprehension was thwarted by his amusement. “No, John,” he said, “and less than ever because of you.”

The entirety of John’s body seemed to flutter with something— _tender_. His stomach turned as it had once done on rough seas and his heart rattled in the confines of its constricting cage. Was the air thinner here? It felt so. It seemed Edward, standing deathly close, was using up much of his oxygen.

“Then you need not worry,” he said quietly.

“But if I were to—”

And then it came; the deft touch of Edward’s fingers against his, grazing, twitching in their hesitance. Catching briefly on his bandage, the rough pad of his thumb fondly followed the valleys of his knuckles before the rest of his fingers tucked themselves behind John’s own. Like this, he lifted their hands together and brought them to his lips. Edward pressed a delicate kiss to the back of his hand.

Every muscle in John’s body came to a grinding halt. A screaming rush filled his ears. _If we die like this_ , he thought, eyes transfixed on the gentle flutter of Edward’s eyelashes as they opened, _would we go to the next life together?_

Their fingers stayed laced together as they lowered them.

“I—”

John squeezed Edward’s hand in his own. Underneath the sting of his palm and the bruising of his nails, he would never forget the feeling for as long as he lived. If they rotted down to the very bone, he would always remember. Edward squeezed back. He squeezed again.

“I must let you be off,” Edward said at last. “You’ll be careful out there. I’d quite like to—”

John’s tongue felt as though it had been coated in chalk, but he croaked a, “Of course,” before clearing his throat. “Assuredly.”

“Very well,” he said, taking a step back. It was another moment before they dropped hands. “I shall see you when you return, Lieutenant Irving.” He paused, a queer smile on his lips. “May God be with you. In all things. Always.”

*

Against what he had once thought, he would not die by famine, but by sword.

As it was, he did not struggle, life escaping him from the wounds in his chest as his mouth was sealed with a palm so his breath might not become air. He was not scared, despite all things, for he had lived in Christ, and those that did so in flesh need not fear death. But, notwithstanding this strange mercy, he feared Hickey. Worse yet, he _loathed_ him.

_Why not before I had felt the touch of his lips? Why not before I loved him first?_

He did not want to look at Hickey, but there was little else he could see beyond him but sky. It was the same the world over, he knew, though the sun would be setting over home by now. With purple skies and an orange horizon, the sun would be falling behind the castle with no promise of returning. Dusk would settle. His people— _his people_ , Crozier would call them—would sleep. 

What had Knox once proclaimed? _O Lord, give me Scotland, or I die._ Intelligible words to many a man here they might be, but not to John. Twice or thrice repeated, he heard a voice—his own voice—once sanitised and lost to him, familiar to him, finally, at the end, returned to him.

 _Nae mair o’ this, nae mair_.

No more of Edward’s touch, he remembered sadly, feeling all that had burdened him lift. All ills and aches and earthly longing. Was that really all the love he was ever to know? All he was ever going to get? Was that just—or, as he was beginning to suspect, did mercy surpass justice every time?

He hoped Hickey was not beyond mercy, though he doubted him one of God’s children. A reprobate, he had called him once. He will be shown mercy, but he will never know His wisdom, and he will never enter into the land of righteousness. Through the haze of his own death, he still felt the other man close; fear lingered longer in the soul, perhaps, or maybe he just had not yet let him be.

Whatever he did to his flesh was no worry of his now. _I will return to my Father’s house in whichever way I am_. Complete or carved open, it made no difference. God would—no, God _was_ giving an unspeakable comfort to his spirit. 

He felt it with all that was left of him.

And then, as he suspected it might, came the haar.

He felt it before he saw it, soaking through his jacket—not his Navy coat, mercifully, for death had set him free of that burden also—down to his skin, down to the bone. As the North Sea permeated his marrow, he looked down to find the granite setts of his city beneath his feet. Might such an act suffice, he would have dropped to his knees and kissed it, though he still feared a new skin as if it were ice.

He took a step forward. Through the grey shroud, it was all quite familiar to him. The Registry House here, the North Bridge there, the Nelson Monument just over yonder. Had he followed his noble example? Had he died for the reason that duty required it? Had England expected, and Scotland had not?

It was not for her fame for which he had died, but for her for which he had returned.

_Hame, hame, hame._

If only, he thought, he could have returned here in flesh once more, an arm in Edward’s arm. He stood atop the bridge, hands on the stone rail. The haar would dampen and tousle his hair, John imagined, but with new hands he would set it back. Smoothed down and tucked neatly behind his ear, it would be as if nothing had touched it. Charmed, Edward would say, _oh, how it reminds me of the sea,_ like the sea mist could ever compare.

But it was not to be, for God had not willed it so.

And yet, for however brief the press of Edward’s lips to his hand had been, it had been perfectly lovely in its impermanence. As all things were, he had often said. It was more, too, than he thought he would ever allow himself to have, and more, he guessed, than some might ever have. There were books in the ship’s library dedicated to such a plight. He had read every one of them.

It was then, as he continued over the bridge, that a sweet voice appeared through the fog. He turned, attentive, as he had always done.

John smiled.

_There you are, my darling._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scotland!—the word sounds as a spell,  
> the marks of magic bearing,  
> and, like a mother's voice, doth swell  
> remembrances endearing—


End file.
